Tuesday, December 16, 2008

WHAT'S NEW IN 2009












LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER YEAR HAS COME AND GONE. And more books are being written and published to keep us occupied throughout the new year. Here are the books that I know will be coming our way in 2009. There is the much-awaited second novel by Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World, and a first novel by Yiyun Li after her widely acclaimed first collection of stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Keep a lookout for Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a début collection of stories. Booker Prize-winners Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee and Barry Unsworth are back with new novels. Kazuo Ishiguro will be coming out with his first collection of stories in May 2009. And so has Man Booker Prize-shortlisted authors, Hilary Mantel, Caryl Phillips, Colm Tóibín and Sarah Waters, who has a chilling ghost story to tell in her new novel, The Little Stranger. Graham Swift has a new nonfiction, a book about the craft of writing. There are also new novels from Pat Conroy, the author of The Prince of Tides, and Colson Whitehead. There is also a new collection of stories from Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness.

From the perceptive and often piercing author of The Space Between Us and If Today Be Sweet comes an emotionally charged story of life, death, despair, and hope, and the lengths we will go to in the name of love. Thrity Umrigar’s new novel, The Weight of Heaven, not only takes a look at cultural clashes and divides, it also illuminates how we recover from unforgettable loss, how easily good intentions can turn evil, and how far a person will go to build a new world for those he loves. Also worth waiting for is Glen Duncan’s A Day and A Night and A Day, the riveting story of an unlikely terrorist and the lost love who leads him into the near-fatal embrace of his torturer. Duncan is the author of six previous novels, most recently, The Bloodstone Papers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has always been a good short-story writer despite her success as a novelist. She has published many of her stories in The New Yorker. It is good to know that she will be coming out with her first collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, in April 2009. I look forward to reading them as a collection.

Novels
  1. The Outlander (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Gil Adamson
  2. In the Kitchen (Transworld/Doubleday, 2009) / Monica Ali
  3. Security (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) / Stephen Amidon
  4. The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Martin Amis
  5. The Crossroads (trans. from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt) (Canongate, 2009) / Niccolò Ammaniti
  6. The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Margaret Atwood
  7. Map of the Invisible World (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Tash Aw
  8. Strangers (Fig Tree, 2009) / Anita Brookner
  9. The Children’s Book (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / A.S. Byatt
  10. Heartland (Tindal Street Press, 2009) / Anthony Cartwright
  11. The Bath Fugues (Giramondo, 2009) / Brian Castro
  12. The Immortals (Picador, 2009) / Amit Chaudhuri
  13. Summertime (Harvill Secker, 2009) / J.M. Coetzee
  14. South of Broad (Nan A. Talese, 2009) / Pat Conroy
  15. Once On a Moonless Night [trans. from the French, Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée (2007), by Adriana Hunter] (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Dai Sijie
  16. The Great Lover (Sceptre, 2009) / Jill Dawson
  17. The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin, 2009) / Stacey D’Erasmo
  18. A Day and a Nights and a Day (Ecco Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2009) / Glen Duncan
  19. Shannon (Random House, 2009) / Frank Delaney
  20. Wanting (first published in Australia in 2008) (Atlantic Monthly, 2009) / Richard Flanagan
  21. The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Adam Foulds
  22. How to Paint a Dead Man (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Sarah Hall
  23. The Book of Negroes (Transworld/Doubleday, 2009) / Lawrence Hill
  24. The Hidden (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Tobias Hill
  25. This Is How (Canongate, 2009) / M.J. Hyland
  26. Nobody Move (Picador, 2009) / Denis Johnson
  27. The Immigrant (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Manju Kapur
  28. Random (Random House, 2009) / David Malouf
  29. Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Hilary Mantel
  30. The Glass Room (Little, Brown, 2009) / Simon Mawer
  31. The Holy City (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Patrick McCabe
  32. The Winter Vault (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Anne Michaels
  33. A Gate at the Stairs (Alfred A. Knopf/Faber & Faber, 2009) / Lorrie Moore
  34. The Museum of Innocence (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Orhan Pamuk
  35. The Song Is You (Random House, 2009) / Arthur Phillips
  36. In the Falling Snow (Harvill Secker/Random House, 2009) / Caryl Phillips
  37. Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Jayne Anne Phillips
  38. Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) / Richard Powers
  39. The Angel’s Game [trans. from the Spanish, El Juego del Ángel (2008), by Lucia Graves] (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) / Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  40. Heliopolis (Harvill Secker, 2009) / James Scudamore
  41. Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Kamila Shamsie
  42. The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay (Penguin, 2009) / Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
  43. The Island at the End of the World (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Sam Taylor
  44. Brixton Beach (HarperPress, 2009) / Roma Tearne
  45. The Escape (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Adam Thirlwell
  46. Brooklyn (Viking, 2009) / Colm Tóibín
  47. Love and Summer (Viking, 2009) / William Trevor
  48. Noah’s Compass (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Anne Tyler
  49. The Weight of Heaven (Harper/HarperCollins, 2009) / Thrity Umrigar
  50. Land of Marvels (Hutchinson/Nan A. Talese, 2009) / Barry Unsworth
  51. The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009) / Sarah Waters
  52. Sag Harbor (Doubleday, 2009) / Colson Whitehead
  53. A Mad Desire to Dance (trans. from the French by Catherine Temerson) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Elie Wiesel
First Novels
  1. Book of Clouds (Grove Press/Black Cat, 2009) / Chloe Aridjis
  2. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (Grand Central, 2009) / Tiffany Baker
  3. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Orion, 2009) / Alan Bradley
  4. Solo (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Rana Dasgupta
  5. Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009) / Paul Harding
  6. An Equal Stillness (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) / Francesca Kay
  7. The Bird Room (Canongate, 2009) / Chris Killen
  8. Secret Son (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009) / Laila Lalami
  9. The Piano Teacher (Penguin, 2009) / Janice Y.K. Lee
  10. The Vagrants (Random House/Fourth Estate, 2009) / Yiyun Li
  11. The Kindly Ones [trans. from the French, Les Bienveillantes (2006), by Charlotte Mandell] (Harper Collins U.S./Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Jonathan Littell
  12. The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Books, 2009) / Gina Ochsner
  13. The Rescue Man (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Anthony Quinn
  14. The Mayor’s Tongue (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Nathaniel Rich
  15. Cutting for Stone (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Abraham Verghese
Stories
  1. The Thing Around Your Neck (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  2. The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008 (HarperCollins, 2009) / Louise Erdrich
  3. Don’t Cry (Pantheon, 2009) / Mary Gaitskill
  4. An Elegy for Easterly (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Petina Gappah
  5. Same Place, Same Things (Picador, 2009) / Tim Gautreaux
  6. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Kazuo Ishiguro
  7. What Becomes (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / A.L. Kennedy
  8. The Last Bachelor (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Jay McInerney
  9. Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2009) / Maile Meloy
  10. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton/Bloomsbury, 2009) / Daniyal Mueenuddin
  11. Too Much Happiness (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Alice Munro
  12. Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Antonya Nelson
  13. Truth and Lies (2009) / Darin Strauss
  14. My Father’s Tears and Other Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / John Updike
  15. The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009) / Josh Weil
Poetry
  1. Recipe for Water (Carcanet, 2009) / Gillian Clarke
  2. Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, 2009) / David Constantine
  3. What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995-2009 (W.W. Norton, 2009) / Stephen Dunn
  4. The Stripped World (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Emma Jones
  5. One Secret Thing (Jonathan Cape, 2009) / Sharon Olds
  6. Tales of Freedom (Rider, 2009) / Ben Okri
  7. A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Alice Oswald
  8. Better than God (Picador, 2009) / Peter Porter
  9. New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Mark Strand
  10. Endpoint and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / John Updike
Nonfiction
  1. Cheever: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Blake Bailey
  2. A Fork in the Road: A Memoir (Harvill Secker, 2009) / André Brink
  3. The Last Supper: A Summer In Italy (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Rachel Cusk
  4. Snark (Simon & Scuster, 2009) / David Denby
  5. The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (Atlantic, 2009) / Margaret Drabble
  6. Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Adam Gopnik
  7. Closing Time (Viking, 2009) / Joe Queenan
  8. Making An Elephant: Writing from Within (Picador, 2009) / Graham Swift

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Can I get all the 'stories' books at MPH? Or Kinokuniya? Tks.

Monday, December 15, 2008 6:34:00 AM  
Blogger Eric Forbes said...

I am afraid these are all new books and slated to be released only in 2009. They are not yet available at bookshops.

Monday, December 15, 2008 1:08:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Eric. I saw you listed you my book here (in the obviously overcrowded novellas category). Just wanted to say thanks. This site is great.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008 5:16:00 PM  
Blogger Eric Forbes said...

Hello Josh: Thanks for the kind words. I believe you have a collection of linked novellas, correct me if I am wrong. It would be great if you could write to me at ericcforbes@yahoo.com as I would like to do an interview with you. Congratulations on your debut!

Wednesday, December 17, 2008 6:27:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Second novel from Tash Aw - that makes me happy!

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 8:18:00 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home